justo_tx

(for the TL;DR crowd, save yourself the trouble and hit the back button now)

So about a little less than a year ago there was a post about coupon sites and the general response was generally negative. Give it up, too hard:

Building a deals/coupons site
Anyway, the thread stuck with me for a while and I decided I wanted to take a stab at innovating in this space, I figured if I could execute the IM lemmings that don't know how to think independently wouldn't be able to touch me and if my spin on it worked I wouldn't have to fight it out in the SEO trenches with the big boys. Enter, socialdeal.net. SocialDeal.net does leverage coupons and it does leverage cash back incentives, nothing new yet. But I took it a step further and tied conversion tracking to social signals like Facebook Likes (tweets coming in the next week or two). I'm not worried about Google for my traffic, I'm targeting people's social graphs and the credibility that comes with those links.

The site has been live for a few weeks, there's about ~6500 coupons in the site so far, and we've gotten a few sales but we're still working on building the user base.

Do me a favor and rip it if you want, I already have an outsized expectation that it will make bank. I want to hear from the haters so I can prep for pitches when seeking funding. Thanks.

http://www.socialdeal.net

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

Budweiser

Great job man, no seriously fuck the haters.. great job

Philip P

First off, congrats for going for it. I'm sure you don't want a bunch of people saying "good for you" though (like that's gonna happen on WF, lol) so here's my honest opinion:

The template is a bit bland.

I think your logo needs to be bigger. If you're not too attached to it, I would consider a design contest for a new one.

You need photos on the homepage.

Nothing jumps out and grabs my eye - maybe a "hot deals" type feature?

Pay some people to like you on Facebook - 13 doesn't inspire confidence.

Good luck with the project!

ly2 from WF

maybe just me but the hosting seems...slow to say the least...

__________________

Philip P

Actually, yeah, it loaded slow for me too...

tencentpiece

At the moment it looks like a bland and uninspiring coupon site. If you have a competitive edge/take on the coupon niche - then present it to your customers and make it bold.

There is a tiny "how does it work" thing at the moment, fuck that noise. Replace the whole front page with a massive explanation of how your site is different from everybody else. I would have a video on the left hand side and then a text explanation on the right hand side.

Then underneath it have your most popular coupons, let people sort it by day week and month.

Socialproof your site, 13 people like it currently on facebook. It's a social site, I see 13 people like it and straight away I am clicking away from that shit.

The site itself is extremely bland and because of that it's not very brandable. Have a look at how retailmenot structures their site and learn from it.

It's an interesting idea, but it's also extremely easy to replicate - if your seriously looking to get funding then what are you going to tell VCs when they ask you "What's stopping the major players in this niche simply copying the social aspect of the cashback side of your business?". They already have the marketshare and if they were to do something like that, you're fucked.

__________________

Got webmaster traffic or a newsletter? Want to rent out mine? PM me.

mgtarheels

So basically, it's a link aggregator for coupons filled with affiliate links?

craigmc

Where's the search button ? I think that would be a must on a site like this.

GerardWon

You took the bull by the horns; few do.

Already mentioned but I agree:

-> 13 Facebook likes -- go buy yourself at least 5K right now

-> http://www.retailmenot.com/ is my only experiece with coupon sites, go there and notice how they have the coupons listed on the left hand side of the page. We all read from left to right; this is a must. I'm in a buying frenzy and want to save cash: give me what I want, right now.

-> I loaded your site a few different ways. I may as well be using dialup, its too slow.

And then:

-> a .net? You'll be an page 400 forever. No matter how you plan to get traffic that is not a good thing.

-> Your twitter name is different than your site's name. I know it can be hard to match the two with twitter, but I also think this is a must.

Justo great job seeing this through.

PS: VC funding will only be concerened with replacing you as the CEO and hopefully sticking up your ass in the process via stock dilution, splits, etc. The fact is unless you have a track record of success in Running a big company and/or have about $50 million in sales you ain't shit to them.

__________________
... Everything Else Is Just Waiting.

Senna Lives!

JoseArmando

Redesign.

__________________
"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."

AustinP

Funtastic,

Heres something you could do

- get more likes. I know a way.
- Get a VA to do 5 new offers a day and pay him monthly
- target specific stores (electronics, jewelry, etc) break it down a little.
- pair up with local stores. online marketing isn't all sometimes. Get offline presence as well.
- Give people a reason to get your coupons. Make up a story.
- Put a goddam search button.
- Jazz up the theme.
- Build up some sweet ass links.
- Forget about ranking right now. Think traffic.

__________________
Cover The Face. Fuck Her Base!

HardSale

Congrats man.

Since bullshitting you won't do you any good, I have to agree with most of whats been said.

From a branding and design standpoint it's pretty bad. It needs much more pop and a much simpler landing page to get people started.

Logo needs to be redesigned and bigger on lander. Also make the USP of your site much more visible, simple and give it more importance. "Earn cash back when your friends buy!

Put the sign up form front and center and the priority of the page. Get that email address.

Good luck, I hope you make tons of monies.

dmnEPC

On the actual coupon pages you need images for the items not just the same etailer logo repeated 20 times for each coupon. You could easily scrape the item images and have a small thumbnail of each item. The site is very bland and boring and hard to stay focused. Remember people dont like to read. And how is this site different or better than something like FatWallet?

lukep

^^^^^ ALLA THIS.

__________________

ShalaMedia

good on ya for taking the risk, no one ever got anywhere not taking risks in life. Everyone seems to be in agreement about a few things, which i agree with:

- Boost your fans, jack it up to 4 / 5 figures at least
- the design is dead boring. Jazz it up without going all myspace on it
- Get a better logo. It doesn't have to cost a lot but make it memorable because if your site kicks ass down the road that will be part of your branding
- Always remember this when you building a site - AIDA (marketing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- You need to break up the main list because if i read through it, after a while it all becomes the same thing and i lose interest
- Explain to people why they should share / use / come back to your webpage compared to the hundreds of others out there. What makes your site unique to a user?

guerilla

Show only one offer from each major brand on your homepage. Repetition and the horizontal listing style isn't in your favor unless you can keep the list short and super high profile. You gotta recognize that less than 1% of your coupons will be in high demand, and you have to serve that first.

You need facebook and twitter like/tweet buttons on the detailed pages.

If you have the capital, offer a prize once a week for a tweet made about a deal on your site. Incentivize people to do your promotion for you.

Above all, carve out a niche or unique angle. Right now, its just another coupon site.

__________________
Change Your Life
Twitter ^ YouTube

Thank you for your attentiveness,
the forward thrusters, engage on you busters,
I cut the mustard.

justo_tx

That is probably due to all the Facebook widgets being loaded. Deals will probably be refactored to a deferred loading shceme to improve the perceived performance.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

Amen to all that, my design skills obviously blow (I've known this, no offense was taken), #1 priority now that the engine is working is getting a redesign done.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

That's a fair initial reaction that I assumed I'll hear quite often but conversion tracking through FB Likes isn't exactly "obvious" and I wouldn't consider it the type of low hanging fruit that most would need to make an outright copy worthwhile. FB started making social signal conversion tracking a little easier (but not much) midway thru our development. I won't iterate our workflows here, it's part of our "wide moat", but when you start to go through all the work flow logic of how visitors can enter my site, who gets credit for the sale and for how much the "gotchas" stack up fast. I don't think it's as easy to replicate as a first impression might indicate but anybody is free to give it a shot

If that's all you got from it I need to work on message delivery (which is true), assuming you didn't take the time to attempt to understand the concept. Fair enough, not all will.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

SEO isn't supposed to be our primary driver, not that it will be ignored, incentivizing word of mouth social media sharing is what will (hopefully) transcend our site from being "just another coupon site".

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

Lot's of little UI tweaks will be hammered out when we hire a proper designer, but there have already been some good points that will be implemented.

FB is already on the detail pages, branded as "Recommend", we're working on conversion tracking thru tweets now, so fingers crossed, those will be there within a week.

I don't really agree with that, but perception is often reality, is the concept of the site not coming across or is it and you still think it's just another coupon site? (As far as I know none of the big boys like fatwallet/RTM does cash back via referrals to your social graph but maybe I missed somebody)

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

And about the funding comments. I'm not really looking for millions, not that I would turn it down , more like a $25K angel investment to pay for a thorough redesign and FB/Adwords campaigns to build a base audience.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

Thanks for all the feed back and critiques so far! The hate (all warranted and constructive so far) is just throwing gas on the fire

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

pocketrockets

^ this. It looks just like all the other bazillion coupon aggregators out there.

lukep

Honestly, it won't come across as Anything but a Groupon-wanna-be until people read deeper down into it.

You have to make it a #1 goal to give them reason, probably an off-site reason, to read down into it more. It needs to be central to your marketing goal & campaign. If not, they'll ALL assume it's just a smaller, less powerful, late-to-the-party groupon clone. -And why even give such a site a chance?

__________________

justo_tx

Agreed, that's this weekends project for my co-founder.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

Yeah, the cash back for referrals is the big message that I haven't been able to accurately convey yet. I'd already planned on making an adjustment so that each deal shows exactly how much cash you get back from your purchases and how much you get back from your friend's purchases. I'm making it my mission to beat visitors over the head with our concept (which is our biggest differentiator).

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

tatrasim

^ this.

Logo sucks, button suck, doesn't look trustable, doesn't look organized.

Every section has a few offers from the same merchant over and over and a tons of pages. Remove pagination, group the offers by the merchant - show the best one and make links - more offers from XX stand out more... Good start though.

justo_tx

I didn't want to gloss over this, it's a huge point that has always been in the back of my mind. Yes, anything on the net can be copied. Fatwallet can say "hey they may have something there" and take a shot and eventually successfully emulate our feature set. But... there is a chance that FW or Slickdeals or whoever doesn't want to cannibalize their revenue by paying out money they don't have too, some of them will cross their fingers and hope we fail (a completely valid possibility) if we don't fail and they see they have to respond we'll be putting distance between us and them. FatWallet would have immense amount of "technical debt" (programmers know what that is) that would go into refactoring their CMS to do what we do with our on the fly URL generation. Again, I have to re-iterate that until you start going through all the possible work flows you just can't appreciate how many variables go into the tracking to make sure people get properly credited but we still keep the maximum amount of revenue. And FatWallet would have to go through all that discovery and refactoring and then roll it out to their existing content without fucking anything up in the process.

I'm not claiming that what we are doing is totally unique but I do claim that we are one of the few (there is another startup I know of doing this too) to actually go through with it, mostly because we don't have anything to lose and no existing revenue stream we need to protect. We're trying to disrupt the old guard.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

The two things coming through loud and clear:

1. Hire a designer
2. Hire a copywriter

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

Fatbat

While there are lots of other great pointers on this page including everything else GerardWon said, this is the first thing I thought of when I read your post.

If this is the name you want to go with then do whatever it takes to get the .com and twitter names or pick another .com that isn't taken and which has a matching twitter account or you're just wasting your time and resources IMO.

Second, I would look very closely at what the other major coupon sites are doing, identify their best features, their worst, and try to improve on them in your design.

__________________
BRAD SHAW - GRAPHIC DESIGN [ WEB - PRINT - IDENTITY ] >>>

blogginginc

If this advice to get the .com is for branding purposes, I agree 100%.

The current design is indeed good. However, not good enough to raise confidence. Check all big coupon sites and create a doc with features you'd like to have and a wireframe. Then send it to some decent designer.

__________________

Fatbat

Definitely for branding, as well any marketing spend, and SEO. Mostly because people remember and type in .com by default. Also, because the OP doesn't own the .com, half of any marketing he does will only go to help the owner of the .com make any site he builds better, or inflate the eventual selling price of the .com if the .net ever becomes successful.

Something else I just thought of after my previous post... why singular? Have you only got one deal on your site? "Deals" sounds a whole lot better.

__________________
BRAD SHAW - GRAPHIC DESIGN [ WEB - PRINT - IDENTITY ] >>>

justo_tx

Just implemented that suggestion. Thanks.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

Douglife

I like it.

Obviously the blue / green doesn't work.

It's a bit overwhelming, and I seem to get lost throughout it.

Consider directing your visitor once they are there.

For the FB like, are you using a plugin or straight XFBML? Hard coding it into the theme may help.

I've tried to get into this area myself, only locally.

Take a look at what I've done so far. Nothing exciting.
Citrus County Coupons - Saving Citrus County Florida Residents & Visitors Money!

Skippy McGee

Looks like you're hotlinking all your images.

A lot of good comments here already. Congrats on getting off your ass and doing it!

bizzykehl

i was bored

detect2173

Go to fiverr and get everything mentioned for $5 (facebook likes, logo, etc, etc). There are some really good suggestions in this tread!

FTC-Hater

Didn't read any of the comments so probably already been covered but definitely get a 10k like package or whatever and disperse them over each individual listing on the front few pages and on your main FB page.

What's your main goal for the page? Without a clear path -> goal you'll probably find mediocre success. Def sign up for Virtual Split Tests and start testing different copies of your page and finding your best.

__________________

justo_tx

XFBML.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

Nope, that's us (but running from our beta namespace), the blob.core.windows.net refers to Microsoft's Azure platform (it's just like hosting images with Amazon).

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

justo_tx

We add about 100-150 deals a day currently, as the number of merchants increases that will rise. Currently there 6528 deals in the database.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

HockeyFan

Maybe I am missing something

But it appears you are incentivizing your coupons, which would be a no-no I'd guess from a lot of advertisers.

justo_tx

Sure to some, they can boot us if they want. I did get some validation, of the concept if not necessarily of the design, from Commission Junction, basically as part of their Publisher Development Channel they'd go to bat for me for the merchants and help get our concept (the incentivization) approved.

inb4cjhaters

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

dchuk

say whatttttttt??????? What evidence is this based on?

__________________

Unsigned Hype

Also, slickdeals.net disagrees

justo_tx

Actually when I settled for the .net this was my rationalization.

And to address the .com/.new thing a little more in depth. The goal of the site, if I ever find a way to get the message across to the users, is to have my users be the drivers of traffic (incentivized likes and tweets) instead of living or dying by the whims of Google's algorithm. Obviously, I'm not ignoring SEO, I'm building out the blogging aspect of my CMS and adding forums to ramp up content and deep linking, in fact I've already converted off some organic traffic. It's just that I don't think I need my url to be something like cashbackcoupons.com to succeed and I even want to leave some room in my name to allow me to tweak the business model if needed, couponsomething.com would limit that to an extent.

__________________
With sufficient thrust, pigs can fly for a short while.

dchuk

Another example:



themeforest.net is top 5 for wordpress themes, which is a very competitive keyword.

FUD all up in this bitch, keep on keepin on justo, shit looks good

__________________

qwekelly

I like the idea, but the concept of the site not coming across. It needs to be super obvious upon the first 2 seconds of visiting the site that users get money from their friends' purchases. Also, people may have a hard time remembering the .net. The idea itself, I think, has promise so good luck to you.

GerardWon

dchuck you are far more knowledgable than I in SEO -- But its based on every G search I do (and I do a lot of them). Also people are stupid and lazy; .com is the default extension.

G search coupons and see how many .nets there are on the first 3 pages. There are none; they're all .coms -- wikipedia.org is on page 3.

Also, keep in mind that we live online, but a lot of buyers don't; and people are very distrustful.

He's looking to raise capital -- I'm betting dollars to donuts that a dotcom wins over a .net, every day all day.

Oh, and it's based on the fact that google wants to be as search friendly (and accurate) as possible; that = .com on a sales site.

just sayin.

__________________
... Everything Else Is Just Waiting.

Senna Lives!